Suspects

Suspects was a trial game run by Jim Wallman. As a trial game it had fewer
players than a real meggagame (less than 20 if I recall correctly). It was set
in Cromwell, the central province of Binni, a corrupt third world semi-
dictatorship (Similar to Kenya). The old dictator, Ancongo, had been
promising free elections for years but the party I led had most of it's leaders
in prison. This is the account I wrote immediately after the game.

When is the Moment to Act?

As local leader of the Democratic Freedom Party (DFP) I experienced
Suspects was a three way game. On the one hand there was the corrupt
government of Ancongo. Then there was DAFT (Democracy And Freedom
Today) - a quite appalling bunch of terrorists who would be even worse
tyrants if Binni ever fell into their clutches. (Jim, the game designer, seemed
to be surprised that DFP and DAFT never attempted an alliance. Why he
thought there was even the remotest chance of this is beyond me.). Finally
there was the semi legal opposition - the miners, the farmers and the DFP.
The DFP's job to provide the glue for this coalition and this we seemed to be
doing.

Binni was a dictatorship but it was not a state based on terror such as
Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany. A lot of political action was possible and
the farmers very soon got the hang of living on the border of what's
permissible. One of the advantages of opposition in semi-dictatorships like
Bini is that even quite tame actions are genuinely revolutionary. [I know this
from personal experience - when I've given out leaflets in the UK people walk
past without seeing me, when I gave out leaflets in Communist
Czechoslovakia I was mobbed for them] The association set up by the
farmers for purely educational purposes (honest guv) was an excellent way
for small farmers to make a firm stand against the government.

What made things complicated was we were doing it in a war zone. In
some ways it made things easier as the police spent most of their time
worrying about terrorists and ignored us but it also gave the police an excuse
to arrest us. It did need the semi-legal opposition to realise that DAFT were
not allies but mortal enemies. The farmers learnt this. It was not learnt by
the miners.

So we come to the Desmond meeting. I really did not have the time to
suss out what the miners were up to. They sort of explained it but information
overload meant I couldn't take it in - all I really grasped was that Desmond was a prominent exile who would be smuggled in to give a speech to a mass meeting of miners. Basically I let them get on with it and
trusted them to do something sensible.

What they were up to was far from sensible. Desmond was jointly
being smuggled in by the secret police and DAFT (the miners leader knew
this) and it was clearly a provocation because both these groups wanted
more chaos for their own differing ends. I really don't know whether the
miners leader was a dupe of DAFT or whether he was by then a fully paid up DAFT
cadre and that we, the DFP, were suckered by him. Who know? But the result was to provoke the legal
opposition into a premature rebellion that was to destroy us.

I'll let others describe those confused events but when the smoke
cleared Cromwell was in the hands of the Brigadier (the senior army in Cromwell)
who I then discovered
had been working closely with the farmers. [If the story appears disjointed at this
point then that is exactly how I experienced it] I then went into complete
mental paralysis because the situation was totally unanticipated. My strategy
had been a slow build up of democratic forces until we could put a mass
movement on the streets so strong that the army could be neutralised.

There are two cardinal sins for revolutionaries. The first is to try to
stage a revolution before it is ripe. The second is to fail to act when the
revolution is ripe. SO WHICH CARDINAL SIN WAS I ABOUT TO COMMIT -
FAILING TO ACT OR ACTING AT THE WRONG MOMENT?

Was it ripe. Clearly it was too soon. I'd increased my support but not
excessively so. Demonstrations were very easy to organise but there was
not that feeling that the people were overtaking their leaders which is the
hallmark of revolution (I'm not sure that the overworked umpires could have
provided this kind of feed back but I'm still sure we were not at that point.)
The revolt was happening only because the army was on our side - or was it?
Was the Brigadier merely staging a coup? The Brigadier didn't so much
control Cromwell as command the largest force as Cromwell disintegrated into chaos
with DAFT launching a massive campaign of violence.

But even if the moment was wrong, was it too late to stay neutral? If
the Brigadier was defeated the repression was going to crush the miners and
the farmers, so the semi legal opposition would have been broken in any
case. The revolt may have been a mistake but perhaps the mistake had
already been made so the DFP might as well do what it could to make a slim
chance of success greater. And even if the Brigadier was only out for himself
perhaps we could build a movement under the wing of his revolt that would
be too strong for him to crush.

No wonder my brain seized up. I might as well have tossed a coin and
indeed that is what I should have done. Instead I spent two crucial game
days wracked with indecision and then too late decided to back the revolt.
Once I had decided I knew what to do and soon the DFP who everyone had
dismissed as wishy washy liberals had the largest armed wing, larger even
than DAFT. (Yes I believed we needed to avoid violence but if you fight you
don't do it by halves) But it was too late, the Brigadier attempted to flee and
the Presidential Guard began their brutal reprisals in Cromwell.

People complained that it was a mistake to have only one province as
it meant that any revolt would inevitably be isolated. I now think that's wrong
and that the Megga game should be in only one province as with the tryout.
Jim said that we should assume that what was going on in Cromwell and
Ahafo province was similar to the rest of Bini. But what was going on in
Cromwell? Our revolt was a complete shambles! Unless our revolt was more
than a botched putsch then the Umpires had no choice than deem our revolt
as isolated. So what should we have done.

1. A provisional government needed to be organised. We needed to have a
clear focus of legitimacy.

2. DAFT was a real threat. Community militia needed to be organised as, in
effect an alternative police force. If we could have made it clear that
DAFT were now acting against the people some DAFT cadres might have
come over to us

3. The DFP had their militia - where was the militia of the farmers and the
miners? The miners would have brought dynamite and so could have
done something about the Presidential Guard's tanks.

We would still have been outgunned but we could have held out. In
effect Cromwell could have become Binni's Vukovar, it's Sarajevo. And then
the Umpires would have been justified in letting the rest of the country catch
up with us. We didn't need to defeat the Presidential Guard - we just needed
to pin them down long enough for the revolt to spread.

This looks like being wise after the event. It's not. Basically it is what I
knew had to be done and I ought to have been able to persuade the others
that it was the right course of action. What did it for me was wasting crucial
time in headless chicken mode.

I have assumed that the miners would have been with us. They ended
the game quite smug. Didn't they realise that the Presidential Guard would
be moving on to the mines to continue their bloody repression there if the
game had gone on one day more? The only way the miners leader could
have any cause for satisfaction was if he had been promised a job as
People's Commissar in a future DAFT government (complete with a supply of
black market booze etc) because it was DAFT who were the true winners of
the day. As one DAFT activist said afterwards with satisfaction: "We got the
authorities to fight amongst themselves and we've eliminated the DFP".
What made that possible was the wizard wheezes of the miners.